I recently installed this on a client's Joomla! 1.5 site after running into a bug in the media manager (the 1.5 version of this com is just named eXplorer) and I have to say I'm impressed. Most commercial products aren't this good. I no longer need an FTP application - at all. This gives me access to everything.

Not recommended for client admins who are too nosy or inexperienced.

The product itself is decent, especially the full calendar view, and at face value it's worth the $20 for the sub.

However, if you run into trouble you are required to pay for support - or hope that someone on the forums can and is willing to help out. This might be a relatively small issue, but there is almost no documentation (the link provided by the developer in these comments returns a 404 error [http://dev.anything-digital.com/JCal-Client/Documentation.html]) and if you're not using it "out of the box" you can spend a *lot* of extra time trying to work it out.

Make sure you read all of the reviews and pay a visit to the forums at AnythingDigital before you commit to this product. When you're billing a client hourly for custom layout, the cost in time can quickly outweigh the benefits of a low initial subscription fee.

Magazine is a wonderful product that makes up for a LOT of what Joomla is missing, and I was extremely eager to get my grubby hands on it.

However the current version is still what I would consider "beta" at best, with several bugs indicative of an incomplete testing process. I stand by my comment that this is a great add-on, but it's simply not done.

Something that's a little unclear upfront when you purchase the product is that it's subscription based; you pay a nominal annual fee if you continue to use it. There is nothing wrong with that model, but again - I'm a little troubled that my subscription includes product testing time during which I cannot use it in the way I had intended.

Third, JXtended Magazine is built "from the ground up" which means it is separate from the Joomla core. I didn't know what that meant until I tried to use other content modules with it - Magazine's incredibly robust nested categories do not work with any other third party (or core) modules dependent on section or category tags.

Finally, Magazine treats code snippets with a fair amount of disdain... if you were to embed a video file, for example, you have to perform some fairly major (to a non-programmer anyway) overhauls to the php and/or databases.

In summary, this is extremely well considered and well intended, but not quite as well thought through. As I've already paid for the first year I'm going to stick with it and see how it pans out, but for the immediate future I'll have to abandon it as a solution for our site, at least until the update is released.

Definitely one to watch, if not to buy... yet.